National News

Bogus Study Fools 157 Science Journals

(NEWSER) – An investigation into the world of so-called "open-access" scientific journals has turned up, well, not much scientific credibility. Inspired by colleagues who'd come across some dodgy-looking journals, John Bohannon made up a study describing the anticancer properties of a chemical, then shipped it to 304 open-access journals. (These types of online journals don't charge readers, unlike standard peer-reviewed journals such as Nature. Instead, the researchers themselves often get charged for publication, explains NPR, which interviews Bohannon.) Of those 304, 157 accepted it, though "its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless," Bohannon writes for Science. "I created a scientific version of Mad Libs."